Methods and systems for estimating the number of points in two-dimensional data

A non-transitory, computer-readable medium storing program instructions thereon, the medium comprising:

• instructions to represent a given set of multidimensional data including a plurality of data points having a value by a hierarchical tree data structure including nodes, each node representing a distribution of a subset of the points in the data set and being partitioned into tiles;
• instructions to calculate a bounding rectangle of the data points in each node;
• instructions to enter all non-empty tiles into a queue;
• instructions to process of the queue can continue until a computational memory space limit is reached or until a desired estimation resolution is met;
• and
• instructions to encode the resulting tree structure;
• instructions to determine compression scales for the hierarchical tree data structure, the compression scale including a compression factor and a decompression factor;
• instructions to persist a record of the compression scales;
• and
• instructions to, during the processing of the queue, compress and decompress the nodes using the compression scales.

A system, comprising:

• a memory storing processor-executable program instructions, and
• a processor to execute the processor-executable program instructions in order to:
• represent a given set of multidimensional data including a plurality of data points having a value by a hierarchical tree data structure including nodes, each node representing a distribution of a subset of the points in the data set and being partitioned into tiles;
• calculate a bounding rectangle of the data points in each node;
• enter all non-empty tiles into a queue;
• process of the queue can continue until a computational memory space limit is reached or until a desired estimation resolution is met;
• encode the resulting tree structure;
• determine compression scales for the hierarchical tree data structure, the compression scale including a compression factor and a decompression factor;
• persist a record of the compression scales;
• and
• during the processing of the queue, compress and decompress the nodes using the compression scales.